In a continuing effort to improve the quality of shipping fruits, I, the inventor, typically hybridize a large number of peach, nectarine, plum, apricot, and cherry seedlings each year. I also grow a lesser number of open pollinated seeds of each of these fruits. The present invention relates to a new and distinct variety of plum tree, which has been denominated varietally as ‘Black Majesty’.
During a typical blooming season I isolate as seed parents both individual and groups of different plum trees by covering them with screen houses. A hive of bees is placed inside each such house, and bouquets to provide pollen from different plum, apricot, and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees are placed in buckets near the trees approximately every two days for the duration of the bloom. During 1998 one such house containing an unpatented purple plum, code named 42P1156, was crossed by me in this manner. To pollinate this purple plum, I selected bouquets from several sources of plum and interspecific trees without keeping specific written details. Upon reaching maturity the fruit from this plum tree was harvested and the seeds were removed, cracked, stratified and germinated as a group with the label “H12”. They were grown as seedlings on their own root in my greenhouse and upon reaching dormancy transplanted to a cultivated area of my experimental orchard located near Le Grand, Calif. in Merced County (San Joaquin Valley). During the summer of 2003 the claimed variety was selected by me as a single plant from the group of seedlings described above. Subsequent to origination of the present variety of plum tree, I asexually reproduced it by budding and grafting in the experimental orchard described above, and such reproduction of plant and fruit characteristics were true to the original plant in all respects. The reproduction of the variety included the use of ‘Nemaguard’ (unpatented) rootstock upon which the present variety was compatible and true to type.
The present variety is similar to ‘Angeleno’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 2,747) plum by being self-unfruitful and by producing fruit that is mostly black in skin color, that is clingstone in type, and that ripens near the first of September, but is distinguished therefrom by being easier to pollinate, by being more consistent in production, and by producing fruit that is much sweeter in flavor and that possesses and maintains much more juice.